Thursday, May 22, 2008

Old wounds have been opened... ranting proceeds forth...

With the release of a new Narnia film, discussions of screenwriters' license arise with it and the bitterness of past releases inspires me to look back.

Return of the King... Just one example but a sad one. An example of arrogance. The arrogance of one Kiwi who felt that he was a great enough director to literally rewrite a great book in his own image. This blog could take days to write if I were to cover every travesty of dialog so I will force myself to post only one example.

Here is Peter Jackson's version of one memorable scene in the story... the gaps are filled in with CGI:

- WITCH-KING: "Feast on his flesh!"
- EOWYN: "I will kill you if you touch him!"
- WITCH-KING: "Do not come between the Nazgul and his prey!"
- WITCH KING: "No man can kill me . . . Die!"
- EOWYN: "I am no man!"





Here is J.R.R. Tolkien's lovingly crafted prose from the same scene in the book:


'Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
A cold voice answered: 'Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.'
A sword rang as it was drawn. 'Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. 'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'

You be the judge.

7 comments:

D and Moni said...

Yeesssss.....release your anger.

Percussivity said...

They don't know who they are messing with!! In college I once wrote a paper on Tolkien and while the teacher was so disgusted with the class's poor effort she made everyone rewrite the paper... well everyone except... Oh have I told you this story before? Maybe I did, it is so hard to remember all the way back then.



"no rewrite"

SQLFunkateer said...

Dwimmerlaik would be a great band name. No, strike that, make that Dwimmerfunk.

I'm not sure you transcribed the Peter Jackson dialogue right. This is what I remember:

WITCH-KING: "Feast on his flesh, Silver!"

EOWYN: "Oh, snap! You try it I'll smite your ### into next Tuesday!"

WITCH-KING: "Weak, you guys, seriously. No man can kill me . . . Die, b####!"

EOWYN: "Suck on this dwimmerlaik!"

Maybe my memory is fading, but I'm pretty sure that was at least the general tone of the movie. Was the Witch-King's steed called Silver? That would have been cool.

SQLFunkateer said...

Just saw over to the right...DNS? Where's my little puking smiley?

But seriously I should probably start learning that a little more in detail. My understanding of all the Forward Lookup Zones, and all the PTR, A, MX, etc records has always been a bit hazy. But not now, I need to finish up the MCSA (thanks to your CDs!). After that I might dig deeper into SQL, something I rather enjoy (particularly reporting).

Percussivity said...

Ah yes... I am reading the O'Reilly DNS book. My boss is eventually going to hand over the external DNS server to me and I have no real experience maintaining an external server. I mean I've created DNS records on ISP managed DNS servers... but I will need to really understand how external DNS works across the Internet. It is not too hairy so far, but I am only on chapter 4.

Ben said...

Either way it reads...it'll probably make me fall asleep like the other LOTR movies did. :)

Percussivity said...

Well I guess the genre isn't for everyone. I first read the book in the 8th grade and have probably reread it every couple or three years to the present... so you could say I am a fan of the books.